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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (150531)	1/6/2000 12:40:00 PM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 176387

TP - from the tech notes on this subject, it looks like the soft key executes but the shutdown routine requires support from the OS to close files, release communications handles and the like, and that stuff gets into the "hosed up" resource allocation swamp. I have seen this happen even when doing normal shutdown, let alone when the resource pool is starved, and I have seen it on lots of machines, not just presario. I think the soft keys are a good idea under most circumstances, and when they don't work because the OS is hosed, the remedy (pulling the plug) is no worse than if the power button is directly connected. (edit - watching the disk recovery run on a 30GB hard drive is a pretty painful process - lots of novice users might just pull the plug again... and that is the result of an accidental reset or power-down if the disk status is not cleared). These kinds of problems are part of why MSFT wants Win2000 to replace Win9X - but the problem of the older software, game performance, direct access to hardware and all of the other things that Win9X users expect was just not doable in Win2000... As DELL gets more into the consumer space they will have more exposure to this totally unmanageable jungle of stuff - as you say, CPQ does about the best in this space and it's still a nightmare. The problem of selling large volumes of machines to unsophisticated users, designed to support any damn thing out there, can not be overestimated... I spent a fair amount of time with some of the MSFT support people and issues like these have created a huge burden for them.